If you have contents in a project in Premiere Pro and you want to send it to After Effects, there's actually a few ways of doing it. I'm going to rule out here the obvious old school way of going to the File menu. Let me bring up my sequence here. Go into File > Export Media, and creating a media file. Of course you can do that, just choose your Settings, choose the Format, make it appropriate. Use the summary if you need to, to compare the source, which in this case is actually your Sequence Conforming settings.

And the output, make them as possible if you can, and throw that into After Effects. A lot of people doing this would go for something like an uncompressed .AVI or perhaps even a QuickTime movie with the, let me just scroll down here. The Animation Codec. Very, very popular if you want to do fully uncompressed media. It's massive, though. The file is enormous. My hot tip is not to use animation as the Codec for QuickTime movie, in this case instead use PMG.

It's really good quality and the difference between a PMG compressed file and an uncompressed animation Codec file is pretty small. You'll probably be happy with the results. But I'm going to ignore this workflow. I'm just going to show you really the dynamic link connection between Premiere Pro and After Effects. Because this is one of the main reasons people invest in Creative Suites for video post production. So, there's a few different options. The first thing to mention is that, if you create a dynamically-linked asset between Premiere Pro and After Effects. And it doesn't matter which direction you go.

You must save the project if you make any changes. If I just re-size a bit here and maybe trim the end of this clip, you can see I've got an asterisk at the top up here. Now if I put this sequence into After Effects as a dynamically-linked asset, it's not the sequence that becomes the asset, it's the Premiere Pro project. So, if I don't save the Premiere Pro project, the changes I've made won't be stored and automatically things will revert to the previous state inside of After Effects.

So be warned, saving is really important here, although just to bake your noodle a little bit. You don't need to save in order to see the update up here inside one or other application. So, you don't need to save to see the results, but you do need to save if you're going to quit the application and open it again in the future. So, how can we do it? Well, here I've got three clips on the timeline in Premiere Pro. And if I want to, I can Lasso these, I can right-click, and I can choose Replace with After Effects Composition. Now, when I do this, all three clips are going to be sent together, and I'm just going to have one After Effects composition in their place.

So, I'm going to right-click. Replace with After Effects composition. This is going to fire up After Effects, and After Effects is going to ask me where I'd like to create the new project that's going to be used to store this media. Now, if you've already got an After Effects project open when you do this, the files you're sending over will just appear inside that project. So, be warned. You might find yourself accidentally adding content to a project that you didn't want to mess with. I'm going to call this sending from PR to AE, and I'm going to click Save.

That's going to be an After Effects directory, and you can see very clearly what's going on here After Effects has received these three. Media files and a composition's been generated automatically that contains them. The composition will match your sequence settings perfectly. And you'll see here my three items, of course artifact's compositions have a stack of layers rather than a series of clips on one track. And if I zoom in a little bit just so you can see what's going on, you'll notice that these clips have already gone. Speech analysis data that's being converted into After Effects style queue points automatically.

There it is. You got the word you as a queue point. So, you've already got that data there if you want to use it as as a reference. It's just there because it can be I suppose, with the right expressions you can and convert that into something along the lines of subtitles. So, this is one way of working. But let me just show you. If I jump back to Premiere Pro, notice that I no longer have those three clips, which is a bit of a pain. Because I now don't have access to them if I want to make changes. Of course, I've still go them in the bin and I can re-edit them into my sequence if I like.

Very easily, I can replace part of that After Effects composition, but they're gone. There is another way of doing this, I'm just going to Undo in Premiere Pro so I'm back to having the original clips. And in fact, in After Effects, let me just select these and get rid of them because I'd like to show you something else. Back in Premiere Pro, I'm just Alt+Tabbing here or Cmd+Tabbing in Mac OS, I'm going to select these. And I suppose if I Click and Drag and hold down the Alt key, I'm going to get a duplicate. So, I'm holding down Alt or Option to get a duplicate.

If I now Lasso the duplicates and send that over to After Effects, I'm still going to have the original clips behind. Doesn't always work if you've got a more complex sequence with multiple layers of media. You need to clean up the timeline a little bit before you do it. But again, if I right-click and send to After Effects, you'll see here over in After Effects is the same result. But back in Premiere Pro, I've now got that foreground layer, which is my After Effects composition. And any changes I make in After Effects are going to update automatically here, but I've got the original clips behind that composition if I need it.

Now again, I'm going to Undo. In fact, I'm going to Undo twice. I'm going to jump back to After Effects, get rid of these. Okay. because I just want to show you something. I'm going to go to my effects and I'm going to put on a simple color correction effect. I'm going make this really obvious. So, just type in color in the Quick Search box here, and I'm going to Drag and Drop fast color correct onto this middle clip. Then in my Effect controls, I'm just going to make this super obvious. Let's make this very, very blue. So there you are, I've got my amazing color grading in Premiere Pro. Now, I'm going to select these clips, I'm going to right-click, and I'm going to replace with After Effects composition. Look at that.

The effect has disappeared. I jump into After Effects, there's no sign of the effect. If I got my Effect controls, let's bring this up here. You'll notice that I've got a stereo mix which is there because the layer has audio on it, but I have no color correction effect on this clip. So, whenever you select your clips on the timeline in Premiere Pro, as I've just done, and choose to send them over to After Effects. Then what you're doing is giving the original clips to After Effects, and you're going to lose the special effects.

You'll get controls like Opacity, perhaps scale and playback speed, but you won't get special effects. So once again, I'm going to Undo. Let's get rid of that effect as well, I don't really need that. Let's go to After Effects, let's get rid of these because there is another way in Premiere Pro. I'm going to get my Project panel. There's my sequence. I'm just going to move Premiere Pro out of the way, so I can see After Effects in the background. And I'm going to Drag and Drop my sequence directly into After Effects.

Now, this time I'm getting a straight footage item from Premiere Pro. Let me go back into Premiere Pro for a second here. This is the equivalent to me going to File > Export > Media, Match Sequence Settings. I'm getting the theoretical output of the frame rate, and frame size, and pixel aspect ratio and so on, for my sequence. If I toggle back over to After Effects, you can see I can drag this onto the Comp button, this going to give me a single footage item. Not three footage items, but just one.

And that is the resulting output from my Premiere Pro sequence. The good thing about this option is, if I toggle back to Premiere Pro, I'm sorry this is a lot of backwards and forwards. And it looks pretty similar, doesn't it? But I suppose if you look at the top left-hand corner that says AE and that says Premiere Pro. Back in Premiere Pro, if I go to my effects, and let's put that fast color corrector back on. Let's go for orange this time because it's nice and clear. Again, I'm going to toggle to after effects and right away it updates.

What I'm getting is a dynamically-linked assets from Premiere Pro. I'm just zooming out here where any changes I make in Premiere Pro, including any effects work, is seen directly in After Effects. In fact, if I toggle back to Premiere Pro and I maybe add a title, okay, let's make this imaginative. This is a titpe further into my sequence, here it is. Toggle back to After Effects, and it appears dynamically. Now remember, if I quit Premiere Pro without saving, and if I say don't save, the title isn't going to be in the project because I haven't saved it into the Project file yet.

That means it's going to disappear in After Effects. And I'm going to go back to the original state for that project. And there's just one more way to do this. I'll just leave that in there so you can take a look at it in the assets. Let me save, and in After Effects, I might as well save as well. Inside of After Effects, I can import sequences directly from Premiere Pro. I'm going to double-click in the Project panel here. And in this Project panel, I'm going to select that project from Premiere Pro. I'm just importing this like any other asset.

I'm going to import as footage. Click Open. And now I get a dialog box, let's me choose which sequence I want to import. Now, there's only one in that project so it's pretty simple. I'm going to select it, and I'm going to click OK. And there it is. I've now got the same result. Actually, if I re-size this panel a little bit, so you can see just re-sizing the heading here, you can see I've now ingested that same sequence. I'm going to turn this into a composition of it's own. It's exactly the same, but I've imported it to After Effects rather than sending it from Premiere Pro. The result is the same, it's just down to a personal preferemce. I think Dynamic Link is amazing, it's a real game changer, it has been as long as it's been around.

There is just one thing you need to be aware of. If I go back to Premiere Pro, now both Premiere Pro and After Effects have tools to gather up any footage items, any assets that you've used in the project. In Premiere Pro, it's under the Project menu, you've got Project Manager. In After Effects, you've got it under the File menu with Collect Files. But dynamically-linked assets, you're probably not going to get any joy with it. So, you need to manually take responsibility for dynamically-linked files, and manually put the copies in the new location.

It's just something to be aware of. And of course, you'll also need the assets that are linked to those dynamically-linked projects. If you've got media files in Premiere Pro, you need those media files, too. So, that's sending work from Premiere Pro into After Effects CS6.

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Released

9/24/2012

One of the great strengths of the Adobe Creative Suite Production Premium 6 is the seamless integration between the various applications. Even so, the best-practice approach to sharing media and creative work between applications remains mysterious to many users. In this course filmmaker and author Maxim Jago breaks everything down into simple, clear steps, offering guidance on project and file management and examples that demonstrate the best use of the technology. If you use Adobe Creative Suite CS6 for video post-production, this course can make your work faster, easier, and more efficient.

Topics include:

Improving speech-to-text analysis with Story

Organizing projects in Prelude

Batch renaming with Bridge

Preparing images for video in Illustrator

Working with Photoshop files in Premiere Pro

Round-tripping a soundtrack from Premiere Pro to Audition and back again